Vereins Kirche and Main Street

Fredericksburg was laid out like the German villages along the Rhine that many of its settlers came from: one long, wide main street running roughly parallel to Town Creek, with each family given a town lot and ten acres of farmland outside. Along Main Street stand stone buildings and Fachwerk, timber frames filled with rock and plastered, the kind of house the settlers raised to replace their first cabins of upright post oak logs.

The Vereins-Kirche, or Society Church, was the first public building, designed by a Dr. Schubert of the Adelsverein and built in 1847 in an old German form, the Carolingian octagon of Charlemagne's chapel at Aachen. Each of its eight sides was eighteen feet long and eighteen feet high, and townspeople called it the Kaffeemuehle, the coffee mill. Catholics, Methodists and two Lutheran congregations all worshiped in it until each built its own church; the Lutherans stayed until 1886. Its rooster weather vane was destroyed by lightning in 1862 and replaced with a cross.

The building that stands on the Marktplatz today is a replica, dedicated in 1935 ahead of the Texas Centennial and built on the original cornerstone, but in stone rather than half-timbering. It is an extension of the Pioneer Museum and holds exhibits on the town's past.